Forever

by Pete Hamill

  “We shouldn’t pay them,” one outraged citizen shouted. “We should hang them!”

  This had some truth to it. Around two in the morning, he saw Hughie Mulligan and his boys moving out of buildings on the far side of the densest fire. All wore the leather helmets of the volunteer fire departments. All wore heavy coats with bulging pockets. They moved quickly, darting in and out of smoke, then vanishing toward their carts.

  About four in the morning, Cormac hurried to the Post on Pine Street and wrote a story (one of three that made the newspaper that morning), left some broad-brushed sketches for the engraver Fasanella, and then returned to the fire. It burned for two days, and firemen came to help from as far away as Philadelphia. When it was over, twenty square blocks and 697 buildings had been destroyed. It wasn’t known how many died, because no bodies were found in the ashes. Twenty-two of the city’s twenty-four insurance companies went bankrupt. The stench of the fire lay over the downtown streets for months, and one thing was absolutely certain: The old wooden town was gone forever.

  “I warned you,” said the Countess de Chardon as Cormac stretched in her bath on the afternoon of the seventeenth and tried to scrub the soot and grime out of his hair and off his exhausted body.

  “And I kept my word and kept my silence.”

  “So you did.”

  “But you’re in danger, Countess. You must understand that.”

  “Why am I in danger?” she said in an amused way.

  “Because they know that you know.”

  She pondered this, her face darkening. “I know more than just this, alas. The Wax Man loves to babble.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  That night she decided that it was time for a vacation in Paris. She would place a friend in charge of the house and vanish for a year. Would Cormac come with her? She could show him all the secret places that she saw when she was sixteen. They could try to meet this writer named Balzac whose name was in all the gazettes. He wanted her to stay but knew she had to leave. Cormac told her that he couldn’t go to Paris. But he would be waiting for her in New York when she returned.

  “It’s nice of you to say that,” she said in a melancholy way.

  “I’ll be here. I swear it.”

  She shrugged. And began the rituals of departure. She packed trunks. She went alone to purchase a ticket on the Black Flag packet that went south to the Caribbean before crossing the winter sea to Le Havre. She said that a heavy, sweet-voiced woman named Sara Long would run the house, and introduced her to Cormac. “She’s a delight,” the countess said, while the woman blushed. “Particularly in bed.” Then she wrote out a long letter filled with what she knew about the conspiracy to set the fires and sealed it, appropriately, with wax.

  “Before I leave, I’ll let the Wax Man’s friends know that this exists,” she said. “And that it will be made public if anything happens to me. If anything does happen, I want you to put this in your newspaper.”

  “I’ll do my best. It’s never up to me.”

  “Yes. I understand. I know, better than most, who decides what goes into newspapers….” She sighed. “Just do your best.”

  She then opened a panel above the bed, slipped the letter into a small safe, and handed Cormac the key. Then she sat down hard on one of her chairs, while snow fell steadily beyond the windowpanes behind her.

  “I don’t want you to go,” he said.

  “But for us, the timing might be right, no?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He sat beside her and she huddled against him while he played his fingers in her hair.

  “I mean something has happened to us,” she said. “When Monsieur Breton arrived, it meant that each of us had a past, and that was too much to carry. The fire was just… a kind of way to end things.”

  “I can’t accept that.”

  “You didn’t think we would grow old together, did you? Sitting in chairs somewhere, gray and full of years, looking at the sea?”

  “No.”

  “Nor did I.”

  “But you could move with me somewhere else for a while. Say you’re going to Paris and actually live in a house up on top of the island until they forget you. They’ll know you’ve said nothing because there’ll be nothing in the newspapers.”

  “Yes, and one night, some fool is passing by, lost and needing directions. And he sees my face, and they come for both of us.”

  She eased away from him, poured a glass of white wine. “And you? In such an arrangement, you’d be a prisoner. You’d be living my life, protecting me, my Irish knight, and slowly going crazy. No, that won’t work. And if I’m quiet, you’ll think I’m remembering Monsieur Breton. And if I play piano, you’ll think of him with his violin. And you might be correct.”

  She stood up and stared out at the snow.

  “Sooner or later, you would go.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She turned to him and smiled a radiant smile.

  “If you wouldn’t go, then I would,” she said.

  He returned her smile.

  “Who will teach me to play piano?” he said.

  “You will.”

  Later that night, they made love while snow fell upon the wounded city. She left for South Street before dawn.

  For three days and three nights, he never left the house on Duane Street. He told the Evening Post that he was exhausted, sick from the smoke of the Great Fire, and needed some time to recover. They gave it to him graciously. The women came to offer him flesh and biscuits. He accepted the biscuits. All day, he played the piano, caressing the keys, trying to remember the melody of Berlioz while failing to club it out of the piano. At night, he lay alone, his mind full of death.

  They all danced for him in the flickering light of a single gas lamp. His father waltzed with his mother. Bridget Riley danced with Mary Burton. The Earl of Warren danced alone, juggling three balls in three-quarter time. Here came all the black women, dancing with Bantu and Silver and Aaron, Big Michael and Carlito, all young and free. There was Quaco dancing with his wife, safe from the fires of the fort. And Dubious Jones with Beatriz Machado. While Kongo watched in the shadows. Cormac hummed as the dance unfolded in the gaslit room and the snow fell steadily and he ached with loneliness.

  It’s time to go, he told himself. It’s time to move on. I have lived too long in this refuge, with its water and scent of lavender. I have lived in a parenthesis of time, and now it has come to an end. The countess is gone, and I must go too. I can’t live in a haunted house.

  He found new lodgings on Mott Street, avoiding the pillowy consolations of Sara Long. Four days later, a mob of puritanical zealots, including Hughie Mulligan, newly converted to the banners of God, stormed the house on Duane Street, beating the women, rousting the customers, carting away the art and the candelabra and the furnishing, and then set the building on fire. When Cormac arrived the next day, scavengers were poking in the rubble. He looked for the safe for hours and in late afternoon found it under some glistening timbers. The metal was still hot. He wrapped it in burlap, cooled it in some blackened snow, carried it to Mott Street, and opened it with a key (using oil to lubricate the lock). The last note of the Countess de Chardon had been baked into ashes.

  Two weeks after that, he was in the office at the Post when news arrived that the Black Flag packet to Le Havre had been lost at sea. There were 216 passengers on board. Cormac scanned the list. The name of the Countess de Chardon did not appear, but he knew she was among them.

  That same week, the clearing of the ruined houses was well under way. The work was done quickly, efficiently, almost ruthlessly. New buildings made of granite blocks and Corinthian pillars began to rise from the rubble. The most important of them looked like temples, dedicated, of course, to Mammon.

  SEVEN

  Boss

  How strange it seems, with so much gone Of life and love, to still live on.

  —JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, 1866

  What are you g
onna do about it?

  —WILLIAM M. TWEED, 1871

  78.

  The bells of the Essex Market Tower were tolling six times when Cormac went up the steps of the Ludlow Street Jail. It was a mellow April evening, and he could hear a piano playing from the open doors of Erchberg’s Saloon across the street. He pulled a bell. A slot opened in the thick iron doors.

  “Who do you want?”

  “Mr. Tweed.”

  “You on the list?”

  “I should be.”

  “Name.”

  “Devlin.”

  A pause. The slot slammed shut and the door squeaked open. A ruddy man in a pale gray uniform sat on a stool, holding a book. He was in a wide gray room with gray women and a few gray lawyers sitting on benches. There was a gray photographic print of the mayor on one wall, and a sad American flag nailed to another.

  “Sign here,” the guard said, offering the book.

  Cormac signed in as Devlin.

  “What’s in the pail?”

  “Ice cream,” Cormac said, lifting the lid.

  “You been here before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know the way.”

  “I do.”

  He walked through the gray room and down a corridor to a door at the rear. He knocked twice. The door opened and a young black man was there. He smiled at Cormac.

  “Evenin’, sah.”

  “Hello, Luke. How is he?”

  “Not so good. The doctor bin here, and it don’t look none too good.” He smiled. “But he lookin’ forward to you comin’.”

  Cormac entered the bedroom, where there was a narrow bed beside a curtained window, steel bars outlined by the street-lights beyond. A mattress was beside the bed, where Luke slept at night, watching over his boss. A pot of geraniums sat on a small night table, which also held a single candle.

  “Jes’ go on through,” Luke said.

  He opened a door and walked into the larger room. Tweed was sitting in a Windsor chair, a colorful quilt over his shoulders. The chair had been built wider than most such chairs, with special orders from Tweed, who was particular about his chairs, since he’d spent his youth making them.

  “Well, you’re the first decent face I’ve seen since the last time you were here,” he said. The voice was lower, but had the old gravelly texture.

  “How are you, Bill?”

  “Not worth a fiddler’s fuck, if the truth be known. The doctors tell me I’ve got bronchitis, cystitis, some other fuckin-itis. My feet are numb with the diabetes. My head hurts. I feel like a bag of bonemeal.” He laughed. “But I’ve still got a heartbeat. Pull up a chair.”

  Cormac set down the pail of ice cream and crossed the room for a chair. There was a boxy grand piano against one wall, a table for meals, flowers everywhere. Cretonne curtains. Bands of thick rubber attached to a casement for exercise. Two of Cormac’s own paintings hung on the walls, one of the Great Fire, and a view of Cherry Street toward the river, along with pictures of yachts outside the Americus Club in Connecticut and a daguerreotype of Tweed’s wife and children. Cormac took a chair from the table, twirled it so that the back faced Tweed, and sat with his arms draped over the curve.

  “I’m worn out,” Tweed said. “Luke has some woman mad for him, that right, Luke?”

  “Yeah, she crazy for me.”

  “And she writes him these letters, very fancy handwriting. Mister Luke Grant, Ludlow Street Prison, on the envelope. Like he was the prisoner, not me. And so I help him with the writing. I mean, I talk, and he writes. He likes those big words.”

  “She do too, boss. She likes that ‘extraordinary.’ She likes that ‘mellifluous.’ She likes ‘magnificent.’ ”

  “She’s after your magnificent fortune, Luke.”

  Luke laughed, and Cormac lifted the pail toward him.

  “We’d better eat this before it melts,” he said. “There’s enough for the three of us.”

  “Yes, sir, Mist’ Cormac.”

  “You know how to spoil a man,” Tweed said.

  “It’s from Braren, the German.”

  “To hell with what the doctor says.”

  Luke came back with two dishes and spoons, and Tweed started to eat.

  “I hope they’ve got ice cream in Hell,” he said.

  “I’m sure they don’t, so you’d better have all you want while you’re here.”

  “Luke,” Tweed said, “fill this again.”

  He wasn’t really old, only fifty-five on this night, but Bill Tweed looked ancient now. His beard was white without seeming patriarchal, his hair thin on his skull, gray and lank. But it was the eyes that looked a thousand years old. They were looking at last like the black sunken eyes in the Nast cartoons, with small stars of yellow light reflected from the gas lamps. He had never been a drinker, and smoked only a rare cigar, but the face looked dissipated, and there was a wheezing sound from his lungs. The great body was shrinking too, the shoulders somehow narrower inside the blanket.

  “There’s less of me every time you show up,” Tweed said.

  “There was a lot less of you when we met,” Cormac said.

  “Aye, wasn’t there…”

  “You were tough as a mule that night.”

  “What the hell year was that?”

  “It was 1844….”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  A summer night. On Grand Street, on the Seventh Ward side of the Bowery. I was still living on Mott Street, Cormac remembered. Painting. Writing the first of the dime novels. Laying cobblestones for a living. In early July, American nativists rioted against Catholics, killing two, beating hundreds, most of them Irish who thought they’d left all that behind.

  “That scoundrel Ned Buntline was stirring them up that summer,” Tweed said. “Another goddamned writer that liked trouble.”

  “And Morse.”

  “That bastard,” Tweed said, taking a fresh dish of ice cream from Luke. “Samuel F. B. Morse. Always insisting on the F. B.”

  “Which the Irish said stood for Fucking Bigot.”

  “Which he was,” Tweed wheezed. “Him and his goddamned telegraph. An invention he thought gave him the right to judge people. If there was any justice, he’d have ended his days here, instead of me.”

  “He certainly helped put those Know-Nothing idiots on the street that night.”

  “The poor bastards.”

  On that summer night in ’44, Tweed was walking west on Grand Street, while Cormac walked toward him from the east. They were a block apart when Cormac noticed him. Nobody else was in the street. Tweed was then twenty-one years old, and in the obscure light of Grand Street he walked with a big man’s casual confidence. If he was Catholic, that rolling gait would have infuriated the men who came upon him from the safety of their carriage.

  “They thought I was a Catholic,” Tweed said. “Me, who believed in nothing, even then. Me, the child of Presbyterians from the River Tweed in Scotland.”

  He laughed.

  “The theory was simple: if they didn’t know you, you were a Catholic.”

  On that night in ’44, the three men in black followed that theory. They leaped from the carriage, hefting clubs that were two feet long. From a distance, Cormac saw them approach Tweed but couldn’t hear their words.

  “They said, ‘Hey, papist!’ ” Tweed said, “and I said, ‘Fuckest thee off!’ Which they thought was Latin. They started swinging the cudgels.”

  Cormac saw Tweed knock down one of them with a punch, but he couldn’t dodge the clubs of the other two.

  “Then you got into it,” Tweed said. “What the hell for?”

  “I was like them,” Cormac said. “I thought you were a Catholic and I didn’t want you killed over some horseshit from the seventeenth century.”

  Cormac picked up the club of the fallen man and stepped in, swinging. He gripped the club horizontally, kicked one of the young men in the ass to get his attention, then slashed left-right, then right-left with the club, driving the man
’s jaw off its hinges.

  “I remember the scream from the fucker even now,” Tweed said, laying the ice cream dish on a table beside a Bible.

  “I didn’t need to hit the third idiot,” Cormac said.

  “That’s for true. I was givin’ him a good hammerin’.”

  His head rose now, remembering that night, and there was more light in his eyes.

  “A terrible hammering,” Cormac said, remembering Tweed smashing the man against a stoop, wrenching the club from the man’s hand and tossing it behind him into the street. The carriage suddenly galloped away toward the East River. The last man was spread on the stoop, unable to rise because of the angle, and every time he tried to get up, Tweed hit him. The man pleaded that he was done. “Well, I’m not,” said Tweed, and hammered him again. Without his cap, the man on the stoop looked to be sixteen or so, with a hairless face, blood gushing from his nose and leaking from a cut over his right eye.

  “Who are you, you rotten little shit?” Tweed said.

  “Johnson, sir, I’m sorry. Bill Johnson, sir, sorry, a mistake—” Tweed stepped back, paused, then hit the man again, driving his head to the side. Blood now covered his teeth.

  “Easy now, mister,” Cormac said. “You don’t want to kill him.”

  “No, I don’t,” he said, and chuckled, then went fierce again, grabbing the frightened boy by the neck. “Who sent you after me?”

  “I don’t know, sir, I—”

  Tweed was laughing now in his room in the Ludlow Street Jail.

  “I did get the fucker to tell me who’d sent him out to beat up people, including me,” Tweed said. “I remember that.”

  Cormac again saw young Bill Tweed driving a hand between the man’s legs, grabbing his testicles, and squeezing. The man’s eyes bulged and a gargling cry rose from his throat. Then the first man who’d been knocked down by Tweed rose on wobbly legs. His bleary eyes gazed around for his club. He patted his jacket as if looking for a pistol. Cormac walked to him, again gripping the club with two hands, and jerked it hard to the man’s chin. The young man fell in a shambling pile. Two of them were groaning on the street now, while Tweed squeezed the third man’s balls.